FISH IN HERALDRY. 71 



used the dolphins for supporters, as bettering in swiftness 

 the azure greyhounds which formerly held that place of 

 honourable trust ; and Portugal among its royal crests 

 has the dolphin and ship. Another fish-antiquity that 

 has survived is the remora. Thus Giovanni Battista 

 Bottigella, of Padua, who fought in the Italian wars under 

 Ferranti Gonzaga, took for device a ship in full sail, with 

 the remora, or sucking-fish, attached to it, and the motto, 

 sic frustra. Another motto for a similar crest is Sic parvis 

 magna cedunt, and it is in this sense that Spenser employs 

 the figure in his verse. The mythical fragrance of the 

 cuttle-fish suggested to Domenichi to give the Cardinal 

 Ferrara as device a sepia, with the motto, Sic tua non 

 virtus, " meaning that as the cuttle-fish by its sweet odour 

 attracts other fish around it, so the Cardinal, by the 

 sweetness and affability of his disposition, drew all men 

 after him." By the ancients, again, the seal was supposed 

 to enjoy immunity from lightning, and among those who 

 borrowed the protection of its skin was the Emperor 

 Augustus, who always wore a belt of seal-fur. The idea 

 arose from the fancy that the seal sleeps most profoundly 

 during thunderstorms, and a seal slumbering peacefully 

 on a rock in the midst of a stormy sea, still survives as one 

 of the devices of the Dukes of Mantua. The crab again 

 was believed by the ancients to grow only during the 

 waxing of the moon ;* hence the crab of the Costi family, 

 looking gratefully at the moon which warms the sea and 

 makes the shelled thing comfortable, with the motto, "I 

 take my form from its varied aspect." 



From the old fiction of the sea-mouse piloting the 



t "That planet," says Pliny, "is comfortable in the night-time, 

 and with her warm light mitigateth the cold of the night." 



